A haptic technology provides various information on a virtual or real environment to a user through tactile and kinesthetic. The word ‘Haptic’ means tactile in Greek and is a concept that includes both the tactile and kinesthetic. Tactile provides information on geometry, roughness, temperature, sliding, etc., of a contacting surface through a cutaneous sense and kinesthetic provides information on the entire contacting strength, flexibility, weight, etc., by physiological acceptance sense through the muscle, bone, and articulation.
Among haptic technologies, vibrotactile, in particular, can provide useful information to the user when visual information and auditory information are limited. The vibrotactile technology has been used in virtual reality and game fields. In particular, the vibrotactile technology has been used for human-computer interaction (HCI) in a structured vibrotactile form. Recently, research in using a vibrotactile actuator such as a piezoelectric actuator for mobile devices has been conducted.
A study on a software tool to facilitate the authoring and evaluation of the vibrotactile pattern has been needed, along with a study on a hardware field to provide the vibrotactile technology. To this end, authoring tools such as Hapticon Editor, Haptic Icon Prototype, and VibeTonz studio have been developed. However, these authoring tools are limited in that they are similar to sound forming programs capable of directly controlling sound waveforms. The methods that are applied to the authoring tools provide flexibility in forming the waveforms, but do not provide intuition to the user when authoring music or audio icons and consume much time.